Speaker 2 - Craig

I should probably stop starting these ridiculously late at night. It's not a good situation. On the other hand,

Craig was our second speaker and he was a historian. I found it interesting that he was a Christian and a historian and so I played close attention to his sessions. He gave us some interesting stuff but I'm going to focus on his reasons why the Bible was true. I remember three major points.

He talked about positive and negative sources and showed us some of the writings by roman historians during the time of the Bible, which 'prove' parts of Christianity.
He explained that all of the authors of the Bible did not know that they were writing the Bible at the time.
He showed us that the Bible is not sanitized. The good is in with the bad which is very unusual for any mythological or religious book. He proved the Bible is honest.

My first question is whether honesty is enough to be truth. If something is honest, is it therefore true? My first thought is that it is not. If I wanted to, I could tell a number of embarrassing stories which aren't true and tell them like they are for the purpose of making people think I am honest. In a way you can say I am honest but really the only good thing about me is that I'm smart enough to use short term lost for long term gain.

(Side note. I had an interesting conversation with a number of people about the difference between honesty and truth. I think the best line was that honesty is something within and truth is something outside of oneself; honesty is the act of making yourself able to receive the gift of truth.)

A counterpoint to that last issue is the idea that why would the writers of the Bible want to make something honest but not true if they didn't even know they were writing anything that would become so famous. In essence they were just scribes who wanted to get the story recorded. Unfortunately I have to get a little cynical here and wonder about the people who put the Bible together. Now I know a little about this but exactly that, a little. Could it not be possible that those who composed the Bible choose from a multitude of writings, those which worked the best? Could some truth be lost in the first Cannon? I've never read 1st and 2nd Maccabees but maybe they've got some stuff that doesn't really agree with the rest. Well, I'm starting to get into areas that I don't want to go this early in the morning so I will stop but the questions do not.